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Monday, 21 November 2011

The literary Inheritance of Twilight

Following on from recent postings about this seasons best selling and rival devices the Amazon Fire and Barne's and Noble Nook Color I thought I'd follow up with an intelligent posting about our literary inheritance. Not wishing to go too high brow I' m going to discuss Twilight and how it can be seen as part of this literary inheritance.

The Twilight movie has been the talking point for many a teenager over the last few years with the movie Breaking Dawn taking over 283 million dolllars in its opening weekend. Never mind literary inheritance, when the children of these modern day phenomenon actors,Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson et al, open their book of inheritance they'll be in for a pleasant multimillion dollar surprise!

So to get highbrow now, what is the main inheritance book for this movie and indeed for the original book? I went searching for the thoughts of the Twilight Movie (book) creator Stephenie Meyer and her thoughts on this : Inspired by a dream Stephenies's story soon started to unfold her dream inspiring her to take up her writer's pen that had lain dormant for so long, at best she'd only ver completed a chapter here or there of stories that never went anywhere. As for this dream in Stephenie Meyer's own words:

"I woke up (on that June 2nd) from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book." So this dream was the start of the book that would eventually become the Twilight Movie, the Breaking Dawn movie and all in between.

As a literati one of the things that stands out in this dream transcript is that the character was a vampire. Culturally us Westerners have been weaned on Vampire stories, this inheritance dating all the way back to the early 19 th century when the physician of Lord Byron: John Polidori penned the first English Vampire story entitled "The Vampyre" in 1819. Of course the vampire was not his creation as many tales of so called seductive blood drinkers had been circulating for many tears and tales might even be traced as far back as Pre-Historic times. However it is Dr. Polidori's story that first romanticises the Vampire and establishes them as charismatic and sophisticated. Something of course which is carried on in the Twilight Movies as it is doubtful whether the Edward Cullen character as played by Robert Pattinson would have been quite so universally adored if he attained to one of nineteenth century Europes images of a Vampyre as a 'bloated , rotting corpse' !

Reading further on into Meyer's literary book of inheritance we find that even the names have some sort of classical influence : " Charlotte Bronte's Mr. Rochester and Jane Austen's Mr. Ferrars were the characters that led me to the name Edward....For the rest of the characters, I did a lot of searching in old census records, looking for popular names in the times that they'd been born"

Hopefully with these new insights into the literary inheritance of the Twilight movies you can in good conscience enjoy both the story and the movie Twilight on either your new Amazon Fire or your Nook Color.

Looking for more books in a similar vein for your Amazon Fire? Christopher Palioni released his third Inheritance Saga this September. This series, which Palioni began when he was a mere fifteen years old, tells the story of a young farm boy who finds a dragon egg and the dangerous fateful adventures that subsequently ensue.